I'm currently struggling to get good performance out of my PC. LFS isn't too bad (6x AA) but along way behind what I think it should be, nK Pro just manages to keep to a 6 FPS cap offline (shaders, no AA) and BF2 demo is still really a joke.

I'm not sure where the weak link in my PC is. It's kept clean with little in the way of background apps. I've recentley updated my graphics and motherboard drivers.

P4 2.8 ghz
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro All in Wonder
Philips PSC 5.1 sound card

The two things I think could be suspect (because they haven't been upgraded and are likely to be cheap crap):

512 mb RAM (no idea where to find what type it is)

Motherboard - I had to install some new drivers when I upgraded the graphics card because it was a non-Intel board. It's a SiS if that means anything.

I've also attached the Conflicts/Sharing page, don't know if they're a problem.

Radeon 9600 is hardly speedy.

What model of P4 is that? I don't know much about Intel chips but I'm sure they done lots of improvements (fairly) recently.

Sound cards make some difference but not enough to really worry about.

Games like BF2 could probably benefit from 1GB of RAM, but that's not really something that affects FPS too much and certainly won't make a difference got LFS.

Not sure how much difference motherboards make tbh.

Your card will limit nK, your proc LFS, and your card (I had a 9700pro and with full AA my FPS was much lower then without). But due to that clock speed it was before a lot of changes, so I think the fastest you could get is 3ghz, so you'd need a new mobo for anymore power. Unless you OC. But with your chipset being SiS, odds of that are slim.

But I'd say get a better card, which will make most games much better, and then mobo allowing, OC your proc. With nice air cooling you could easly get 3.2ghz.

probably the ram in conjucture with a crappy ram controller in the sis chipset

@P5YcHoM4N - I'm not aiming to get a top spec computer, just something that can cope with the latest crop of race sims. I upgraded to a 9600 in the hope that it'd be enough for nK. Should I actually be able to get anything like the FPS posted in the marketing hype for an inferior machine in nK (minimum 40 FPS online) I can't keep that minimum offline with a lot of settings turned down. Something doesn't seem right here because whilst my PC is hardly high spec it should be faster than it is.

Quote from Shotglass :

probably the ram in conjucture with a crappy ram controller in the sis chipset

Sounds more likely. No idea where I'd start with that though. How complex is upgrading a mother board, should it just involve unplugging everything then plugging it into the new motherboard and turning it on? I really have no idea here.

Swapping boards is easy, just take your time, remove everything, be careful for your first time. Hell I managed to take my PC completey apart and put it back together when I was 9 (although they were much more resilient back then), so I'm sure you'll manage.

Just watch out for the metaly bits that raise the board from the case, not really sure what they're called. But I've known several people who thought they were PC literate to install the motherboard by screwing it directly to the case. Then they played guess that smell.

I have pretty much the same PC as you (P4 2.8, 9600Pro, 1GB ram, onboard optical sound) and I have 2xAA/2xAF forced on my card.

In LFS at 1280*1024 I get about 50fps average, with about 25 at the start with a full grid (online).
In nKP I get 30fps max, about 22 average, and a low of 7 on the grid at the start.
in rFactor I uninstalled it before I worked out how to see the fps.

Are motherboards standard sizes or do you have to modify the case?

And what sort of motherboard should I be looking at? Is it worth going to a PCI graphics port even if I wouldn't put much more than a £40 graphics card in it?

Quote from tristancliffe :

In nKP I get 30fps max, about 22 average, and a low of 7 on the grid at the start.

That online with shaders?

Quote from Bob Smith :

Swapping boards is easy, just take your time, remove everything, be careful for your first time. Hell I managed to take my PC completey apart and put it back together when I was 9 (although they were much more resilient back then), so I'm sure you'll manage.

Just watch out for the metaly bits that raise the board from the case, not really sure what they're called. But I've known several people who thought they were PC literate to install the motherboard by screwing it directly to the case. Then they played guess that smell.

It's rather hard to break hardware, and with everything being notched and keyed, you can't do anything wrong, as long as you don't force anything to fit.

Quote from ajp71 :

Are motherboards standard sizes or do you have to modify the case?

And what sort of motherboard should I be looking at? Is it worth going to a PCI graphics port even if I wouldn't put much more than a £40 graphics card in it?

They are standard, but as you have SiS, I'd assume you have a mini-atx, which means if you get full ATX you'll have to move some little brass stand offs around to fit the new holes on your board.

And you'll be best looking at an AGP board. As I don't recall there ever being a PCI version of the 9600.

first thing you should do is run cpu-z and find out exactly what processor you have and what type of ram so you can work out what motherboard you need and if you want completely new rams with that

Is it worth sticking to the same board manufacturer? And where can I find what model of board I have?

Sorry for my n00biness at this

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

And you'll be best looking at an AGP board. As I don't recall there ever being a PCI version of the 9600.

I was saying would it be worth getting a PCI board + cheap PCI card as that would possibly give better room to upgrade graphics at a later date.

Quote from ajp71 :

Is it worth sticking to the same board manufacturer? And where can I find what model of board I have?

run cpuz damnit

depends on wether you like the board you currently have or not ... but with it being an sis board theres a good chance it wont be from any of the big players
btw is it an oem pc ? if so you might want to check how many slots for expansion cards your case has

Quote :

I was saying would it be worth getting a PCI board + cheap PCI card as that would possibly give better room to upgrade graphics at a later date.

you wont find a pci-e mobo for your processor

Sorry missed the last post.

Here are the results:

http://thegreenhell.rscsites.org/cpuz.htm

Quote from Shotglass :

depends on wether you like the board you currently have or not ... but with it being an sis board theres a good chance it wont be from any of the big players
btw is it an oem pc ? if so you might want to check how many slots for expansion cards your case has

Can I check my expansion slots quickly or do I have to open up my PC?

Quote :

you wont find a pci-e mobo for your processor

OK that ends that train of (totally unintelegant) thought :doh:.


EDIT - My PC is a 3 year old off the shelf Packard Bell so I think that means it is OEM.

Quote from ajp71 :

Can I check my expansion slots quickly or do I have to open up my PC?

just look at the back of your case the slots on the bottom (one of those will be filled with your graphicscard)

just spoke to my intel guy and his take is that a new mobo and rams will bring less gain than i initially expected so lets try another approach first before you spend any money ... how old is your windows installation ?

Fresh a couple of months ago, did a whole restore again - ie. a lazy Packard Bell script to format the hard drive and reinstall windows whilst you brew a cup of tea, probably not the best way to clean up the PC as it puts all the pre-installed software (95% of which is pointless crap) back on.

I did however on my fresh install put on some of the Windows cosmetic tools on including:

Style XP
Litestep shell
Wincustomise login + boot screen changers
Styler toolbar

I've now gone back to using the Windows Classic theme and standard XP login and boot screens, because I decided the only way to get windows to look 'right' for my tastes was to run a different shell but I finally decided I had had enough of the inconvinence of using these programs.

If I re-installed windows without formatting the hard drive what happens to the registry and drivers, does it make a dogs breakfast of it? If I could repair my Windows installation without having to reinstall all my programs and drivers it may be worth doing. Although I can't really see much benefit as it seems to be running pretty well.

Quote from Bob Smith :

Swapping boards is easy, just take your time, remove everything, be careful for your first time. Hell I managed to take my PC completey apart and put it back together when I was 9 (although they were much more resilient back then), so I'm sure you'll manage.

Sorry to go off-topic, but this made me chuckle since I never saw a computer until I was probably 10. And at that, the pixels were probably around an inch square, LOL. It was really something to make a square yellow smileyface with square eyes on the 10 inch monochromatic monitor, or whatever it was.

I start to get controller lag in nk when using shaders, framerate with shaders is somewhere 35-40, without shaders 80+, nice that one can switch them on and off from H key.

I have Amd Athlon 64 3200+ and radeon 9700(not pro) 512Mb memory.

I never use AA as I don't see why, everything moves so fast already that I can't spot what it does, except makes thing blurry, AF then makes so huge fps hit and also stuttering that I can't use them. I like more to get as much fps as possible when I race as I'm not looking scenery and going to make paintings from nice view or anything like that.

6600GT might be minium today, it is twice as fast as 9600Pro but still not very fast, at least price is somewhere near normal, price of used engine or transmission, where top gfx cards cost as much as rwd car with 2ltr engine and near 50/50 weight distribution, you can guess which one is more fun

custom GfX drivers?

http://www.omegadrivers.net/


i got a fair boost in performance when i installed these over the standard CCC, with no problems at all.
everything which the card supports cranked up, cept the z buffer

bout 40-60fps, 20 on grid

2.6Cel D
512
Ati 9200
Sidewinder Force Feedback PRO

Tried the Omega drivers. On nK FF1600 @ Newbury I got slightly higher frame rates dipping down to around 29 in the high detail sections, but it seemed to feel a lot faster than before, possibly the nK frame counter is faulty (like the GTP one was) or does 2 or 3 FPS make that much difference (bearing in mind we are talking about the very low FPS region).

id does make a difference yes ... visually ans especiall in rfactor and nk which both have laggy steering at low framerates

after talking to my intel guy for a while and reading up a bit on you graphics card i think it migh be the weakest link after all (at least with shaders aa and af)
but overall it seems like you plc is more or less one big weak link

Maybe thats not most important but your card works in agp 4x, this is odd as i think your card should be agp 8x, does you mainboard have agp 8x ?
I also look at your mainboard bios date, its quite old so maybe you can upgrade it to something newer, sometimes this help, sometimes not but its maybe 30 minutes of work.

PS. If you have the money i recommend to you Galaxy Geforce 6600 (GE) on AGP, this is shortcut for Galaxy Edition or Gamer Edition, anyway its gf6600 with ddr3 mem so after all its like GT and whats best its cheaper then it, and even stock overclocks lot better then friend Leadtek GF6600 GT with 256 mb ddr3 (i think he have slower mem on that then mine). Its very good deal and if you can find it, i highly recommend it as its even faster then some GT models.

If using modded nV drivers I'd go for Z-Tweaked ones, always seem to do best with them.

Resource for all sorts beta, WHQL and modded drivers
http://downloads.guru3d.com/

Thanks for info, i know guru3d but i have only used omega on my old radeon 9100, but for geforce omega got only some old drivers. I should try these Z-Tweaked one. Now i'm more happy with GF6600 as ATI Tool is now working with geforce cards :P